Let me briefly acknowledge tonight’s distinguished honorees. Admiral James Stavridis is a, is the real deal. He can tell you more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALs and what they did last Sunday.

And:

Folks, I’d be remiss also if I didn’t say an extra word about the incredible events, extraordinary events of this past Sunday. As Vice President of the United States, as an American, I was in absolute awe of the capacity and dedication of the entire team, both the intelligence community, the CIA, the SEALs. It just was extraordinary.

Let’s see… who do you trust, Cenk Uighur (spelled on purpose) or Leon Panetta who exposed the truth to Obama’s favrit network NBC? – Leon Panetta of course.

Let’s see… Donald Rumsfeld said no water boarding at Gitmo (every video played has his exact words) but water boarding at secret rendition sites which provided the original information to track down bin Laden. Donald Rumsfeld of course.

Let’s see… Two leftist slobbering MSM groups (WA Post and AP) wrote articles saying enhanced interrogation techniques worked vs. Amy Goodman from the leftist NY Times who exposed the monitoring of bin Laden and associates phone calls and money trails. WA Post and AP of course.

As much as I am loathe to try to reason with Spuddypud, one thing is clear. He really has nothing positive to add to a conversation, he comes in here to shit on a thread and make shit up and whine about being belittled for that. He and his kind thrive on negative attention. It is all they need to justify themselves. They would rather be disliked than listened to. They would rather be seen as the imbeciles they are than look at how they might be wrong about something. Their minds are closed, and determined. They refuse to learn. They refuse to even attempt to think outside of their own predeterminations.

Spudds, the SEAL teams were reorganized under Clinton, SEAL team six as folks are referring to really is the old name for the NSWDG, Naval Surface Warfare Development Group. After the debacle at Panama City airport during operation Just Cause, the US Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff commissioned several studies on how such a highly trained and conditioned small team combat group could have been so badly misled and misapplied in a situation they were not trained for. They were a small team commando force, working with minimum equipment, lightly armed and trained to work in groups of six to fourteen, plus command. Their purpose was to get in, complete the mission and get out before anyone knew what was happening.

During Just Cause, they were grouped into teams of several dozen, and the command structure they Navy had developed for the small team model did not apply. As a result, communication between team members and their respective commanders broke down and as they were dropped into Panama City, they were carrying huge amounts of equipment that they really never had to deal with before. In essence, they were treated like Airborne Rangers instead of small strike teams. The difference is, Rangers are designed, as a force, to be surrounded and fight their way out or to hold ground until they can be relieved or reinforced. SEAL teams were designed as sneak in, sneak out strike teams. They were horribly misapplied in Panama, and lost nearly 70 team members as a result after they were pinned down by a large force of Panamanian military police.

George Bush was like a little kid with a new gun, he did NOT understand how SEAL teams worked, he had no concept of how small unit combat teams were supposed to function, and had no desire to learn. He openly derided the people who tried to explain to him how such teams worked, and fired several people for contradicting him on his notions. He thought they were elite because they were so highly trained as individuals, not how they were trained as teams. So he had no clue as to what their designed purpose was, and got a lot of those men killed because he was too stubborn, too stupid and unable to grasp the concept they SEALs were designed around. After Panama City,a lot of the old school SEAL team members refused to re-enlist entirely based on their total lack of confidence in the Bush administrations ability to make decisions. There were a lot of early retirements, and when Clinton became president, the teams had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.

I know a couple of such people. Incompetence, thy name is Bush. It will always be so. The Bush family defines willful stupidity and ignorance. Every decision they’ve ever made as politicians has been wrong, and based on their personal concepts and desires, rather than what national situations call for.

Good question. I don’t know a thing about how Arabic (or whatever language Osama was speaking) is pronounced. I wonder how lip-reading would work, given the nature of how vowels and consonants are formed by the lips. It might not even be possible. As an example, Chinese I know is impossible to lip-read, as much of the pronunciation is tonal rather than lingual. The same might be applicable to Farsi or Arabic.

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: And, you know, when you look at the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques in the case of the trail of evidence that leads to Osama bin Laden, what you find is, time and time again, it slows down the chase. In 2003, when we—or ’02, when we have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have the person most likely to be able to lead us to bin Laden, and yet we don’t get to him until 2011. You know, by any interrogation standard, eight years is a long time to not get information from people, and that’s probably directly related to the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times.

The other piece of the story that we don’t know yet is we don’t know how the CIA learned the real family name of the courier, who again, his nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And we don’t know how the CIA got his real family name, which really was the key piece of information that led us to be able to monitor phone calls and emails and discover his first name, his full name, which led to us finding him and then him leading us to the compound. So, until we have that information, which we don’t even know if it came from interrogations or if it came from a source, then we really don’t have a complete picture of how we got to bin Laden.

@30: That this is a debate is again unfortunate. That guy was involved with 1300 interrogations in Iraq, and yet it’s as though there is a debate, and his opinion has no more weight than that of draft dodgers like Karl Rove, Bush, and Dick Cheney.

@3 Here’s what I think, pussybutt. First of all, my condolences to Ms. Burlingame and Mr. Beamer for the loss of her husband and his son, and for all the other 9/11 victims and their families. But this New York event was supposed to be a low-key commemoration and Ms. Burlingame and Mr. Beamer are out of line by trying to turn it into a townhall debate so they can ride the president’s coattails to publicly grandstand their political views. Way out of line. Secondly, I would ask Ms. Burlingame to please spare us her faux outrage at POTUS for “turning his back on her.” He didn’t turn his back on her. He engaged her in conversation for a several minutes, which is far more face time with the president of the United States than most of America’s 350,000,000 citizens ever get in a lifetime. When she started going off on a tangent he decided to end the conversation and give some of his time and attention to the other people present, which was entirely appropriate. Does she think she has a right to monopolize his time? Thirdly, if this is what he walked away from

“she confronted him over the prosecution of the CIA agents who interrogated 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed”

then I say “good for him” because the lady’s a flake — what CIA agents have been prosecuted? What prosecutions is she talking about? Maybe they should be, but so far as I know, nobody’s been prosecuted for anything. In fact, one of my beefs with this administration has been its refusal to prosecute people from the prior administration who broke U.S. and international laws by torturing people. They committed war crimes, puddytat. Horrible example for our goverment to set. And you defend that. Shame on you. You’re an animal right along with them.

So there’s no misunderstanding here, I’ve said all along — and I’ve consistently said this for several years now — that if you rightwingers want to torture the bastards responsible for 9/11 I’ll look the other way. But if you imprison, torture, or kill even one innocent person — you hang. And there’s been way more than a few innocent people who have been savaged by the GOP-sponsored kidnappers, tortures, and killers. So, yes, there should be trials. I’m very disappointed with Obama and Holder for kicking the can down the road on this.

But as far as giving Ms. Burlingame a microphone to spew her anti-Obama venom on national TV … no, Obama has no obligation to do that. When she tried to turn a commemorative event into a political event, he was right to walk away from her. She was way the hell out of line.

Video 1: A complete, unreleased message to the American people. U.S. intelligence said it was dated some time between October 9 to Nov. 5, 2010. Bin Laden is shown sitting down, dressed in a gold robe, his beard is dyed black and the background is blue. There is no audio but the official said bin Laden is giving his standard message of condemning U.S. policy and capitalism.

@4. Let’s see. She told Faux news, so right there, nothing the president does will be right.

She told Fox News: ‘I was very upfront, I said Mr President, I’ve been one of your most ardent critics, but on Sunday night I was very proud of you, I was very appreciative of what you helped make happen, and I was very proud of America.

‘And then he hugged me, but then I said I have a question for you.’

She said: ‘As a former attorney I know you can’t tell the Attorney General what to do, he said, “No, I can’t.”

But I said “we – that shouldn’t stop you from giving your opinion. We wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t done their jobs. Can’t you at least give them your opinion.”

And he said “no I won’t,” and he turned around and walked away.’

So, it’s a made up controversy. He did his job and she’s irritated by that.

One of the comments observed

“When the 9/11 families criticized Bush they were called all kinds of names and told to shut up.”

Why are you conservatives not telling those families to shut up? Oh yeah, cause he’s black and democrat and, unlike bush, he bothered to get Bin Ladin.

This comment was fun too

What a bunch of ungrateful idiots! Which of any of these complainers has done a single thing to get Osama Bin Laden in the past 10 years? All George Bush did was pose in front of a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED sign 5 or 6 years ago!!! The relatives of victims thought it was unseemly? What the hell did they think of the failure of everyone else for 10 years to get OSAMA? Was THAT okay with them because nobody took credit for failing? To hell with them. Some people just cannot get past their racism no matter what sort of achievement a black man has. (No, I’m not black.)

Another poster mused about timelines. How the republicans are always saying that the reign of bush is over, and the economic situation is all Obama. Yet when Obama initiates and gets Bin Ladin, NOW the republicans want credit for the nothing that bush did for the last 7 years.

So basically, anything negative = the incompetent governance of Obama. Anything positive = legacy of the good governance of bush. And you wonder why I dismiss all of you conservative hacks.

Speaking for myself, fucking with mentally ill people is tacky at best.

At some point (reached far in the past in this case, imo), it says more about some of us than about Pudpuller when we even acknowledge him — except to point out his illness and urge him to seek help / take his meds.

I’ve been saying it for years. Spudds is representative of the mindset of a lot of people. It isn’t about the Nation, its about themselves. They have a wide open resource now to make their opinions known, and it is obvious why, in the age before the internet, they were never really taken seriously. They’re the crazy people, the ones who were walking around with sandwich boards back at the turn of the 20th century with “THE END IS NIGH, REPENT” painted on them. The people who cannot, for the life of them understand nuance or the difference between conjecture, outright falsehoods and basic factual information. The people who think that everything is purely a matter of personal opinion, that there are no solid facts in anything. Nihilists.

I wonder what Walter Cronkite or Chester Huntley would have thought about the teabagger/birther/Randroid types now dominating the national discourse?

Of course, we only have that mans word to go on. anything coming out of the Bush administration, or any one of the individuals working for it I automatically take with a grain of salt. They lied about absolutely everything. That administration was to utterly incompetent, so totally corrupt that I would question their veracity if they tried to tell me that dogshit was brown.

Spudds, the SEAL teams were reorganized under Clinton, SEAL team six as folks are referring to really is the old name for the NSWDG, Naval Surface Warfare Development Group.

NSWDG = Naval Special Warfare Development Group

After the debacle at Panama City airport during operation Just Cause, the US Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff commissioned several studies on how such a highly trained and conditioned small team combat group could have been so badly misled and misapplied in a situation they were not trained for. They were a small team commando force, working with minimum equipment, lightly armed and trained to work in groups of six to fourteen, plus command. Their purpose was to get in, complete the mission and get out before anyone knew what was happening.

During Just Cause, they were grouped into teams of several dozen, and the command structure they Navy had developed for the small team model did not apply. As a result, communication between team members and their respective commanders broke down and as they were dropped into Panama City, they were carrying huge amounts of equipment that they really never had to deal with before. In essence, they were treated like Airborne Rangers instead of small strike teams. The difference is, Rangers are designed, as a force, to be surrounded and fight their way out or to hold ground until they can be relieved or reinforced. SEAL teams were designed as sneak in, sneak out strike teams. They were horribly misapplied in Panama, and lost nearly 70 team members as a result after they were pinned down by a large force of Panamanian military police.

I believe that your too biased. The President gave the “go, no go” for that particular mission, however it would have been SOCCOM that would have designated units and tactics for said mission. The missions the SEALs carried out in “just Cause” were planned by SEALs. Wasn’t it the Navy that wanted “in” on the action that turned the airfield mission over to the SEALs?

For example, President Obama didn’t sit around and pick the units that conducted the raid into OBL’s compound. He picked the mission profile presented to him. To say that President Obama “picked” DEVGRU for the mission, over say, CAG is not logical.

George Bush was like a little kid with a new gun, he did NOT understand how SEAL teams worked, he had no concept of how small unit combat teams were supposed to function, and had no desire to learn. He openly derided the people who tried to explain to him how such teams worked, and fired several people for contradicting him on his notions. He thought they were elite because they were so highly trained as individuals, not how they were trained as teams. So he had no clue as to what their designed purpose was, and got a lot of those men killed because he was too stubborn, too stupid and unable to grasp the concept they SEALs were designed around. After Panama City,a lot of the old school SEAL team members refused to re-enlist entirely based on their total lack of confidence in the Bush administrations ability to make decisions. There were a lot of early retirements, and when Clinton became president, the teams had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.

Again, given the fact that President Bush had been DCIA and VP for over a decade, he was in a far better position to understand capabilities and missions of military units than the man he followed, or followed him… “new Gun”? hardly. While I don’t doubt that some left after Just Cause because there were hard feelings about Team 4 losing men, good friends, and in hindsight that the mission may have been better handled by another unit. I think it’s more a reflection of NSW as a whole than President Bush. Could be wrong. Just my opinion. Wasnt’t the reorg and NSW2K iniiative more to do with training and expanding the TEAMS than an exodus of personel?

40 – The internet has been the most interesting social catalyst perhaps in human history.

Everyone (with internet access) is now a publisher. Everyone (again with internet access) can have an audience – even if it’s a limited one.

The crazies had no outlet before outside of their local crazy religious congregation or the occasional right wing talk show – itself being enabled by the dropping of the fairness doctrine by Raygun.

So the new media has greatly enabled their madness but still they’re at a disadvantage on the internet.

Because their social organization is inherently hierarchical – pyramid shaped. They prefer things that way. Since their brains are tuned to processing fear – they need to believe the guy at the top of the pyramid is looking out for them.

The internet is designed to route around failure, blockages, noise. Advantage to those who network, who seek the bigger picture and want to connect with those who have a clue.

It’s interesting that the right wing was the first to make a splash on the internet – see the Little Green Footballs, the Instapundits and the like but when it came to social networking the Daily Kos’ and other liberal websites stole the show. Red State? Don’t make laugh.

As much as I am loathe to try to reason with DaedToad, one thing is clear. He really has nothing positive to add to a conversation, he comes in here to shit on a thread and make shit up and whine about being belittled for that.

I’ve been saying it for years. DeadToad is representative of the mindset of a lot of people. It isn’t about the Nation, its about themselves.

Liberals never say they are sorry, they just turn their backs on you and walk away when caught by their actions. Witness what Obama did to Debra Burlingame at Ground Zero this Thursday. Joe Biden rats out Seal Team 6 and the Vice Admiral.

If he truly is mentally ill then perhaps the moderators shouldn’t be enabling him.

Speaking about yourself in the third person yelling loser boy, who spends ALL DAY on this blog?

BTW 1/3 of my comments are repeats because you leftists have 24 hour moronic mindless memory malady. So that would be 20K new comments. BYT douchebag did you see the NBC link for Brian Williams and Leon Panetta?

Here’s what I think, pussybutt. First of all, my condolences to Ms. Burlingame and Mr. Beamer for the loss of her husband and his son, and for all the other 9/11 victims and their families. But this New York event was supposed to be a low-key commemoration and Ms. Burlingame and Mr. Beamer are out of line by trying to turn it into a townhall debate so they can ride the president’s coattails to publicly grandstand their political views.

Well Roger Dumb Rabbit, he’s my rebuttal…

GW Bush and William Clinton didn’t want to go to Ground Zero. Mrs Clinton had scheduling conflicts. Why? Cuz Obama was spiking the football making it political. Watch in the coming months when he refers to going to Ground Zero. He NEVER went there before last Thursday. EVER!

What does the wreath do? Provide closure? What does bending over in a prayer pose do? Thank God Osama is dead? Does that provide healing to the country? The preznits people sent a mass emailing to the people “hand-picked” for this event. There wasn’t anything personal about the invitation. Why were they “hand-picked”? Politics, pure politics!

And Burlingame has a right to question Obama about Holder still prosecuting the very people who authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which we NOW KNOW allowed Obama to kill Osama. Obama has no balls and wouldn’t upset his freakazoid fanatics who still can’t swallow the truth about the gathering of the intel!

Here we go again… I have to repeat this for the THIRD time now because yelling loser boy is a chronological idiot! Now you know Troll why Puddy has many comments here. It’s for the fools like yelling loser boy who conflate the truth and make idiotic “pronouncements”!

Wow, clueless wonder that’s the best you can do.

Scumbag!!! YOU dance on Mike Webb’s grave.

First fool when did Mike Webb die? Sometime after April 13, 2007 right.

And this post is 01/25/2006 at 6:48 pm. Pelletizer does a better job than you moron and that’s not saying much!

So much for your databaze forensics yelling loserville boyfool.

Wow almost 15 months and more of a chronological failure now yelling loser boy brings it up! PWNED big time!

Thank you for PWNing yourself as the reading comprehension mental case you are!

“yeah, without Bush’s interrogation methods Osama would be alive today.”

Really? Please elucidate with facts, ilnks, etc. My understanding is KSM though waterboardtortured, denied knowing the name of the courier. So you’re saying that it was the “strength” of his denial (“ohmygod! he denied even though we’re torturing him!!!! the courier must be important! Because he DIDNT’ SPEAK AND TELL US HIS NAME!”) that shows the torture was effective?

Isn’t this totally shamelessly backasswards?

please tell me the piece of info we got from torture that we otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. BTW I thought the justification wasn’t “we need torture to find OBL” it was “we need torture to prevent a ticking time bomb” so if the torture lead to finding OBL over five years or so …..it really dind’t prevent any attack, right?

given that likely hundreds of people knew where he was, isn’t it more likely that our use of torture gave many pakistanis a moral reason to …you know….like hate us as the devil? motivating them to NOT tell us?

try to work through each logical chain and respond.

then answer me this.

wasn’t the existential threat to america worse when we faced the entire fucking british empire, in 1776?

And agai in 1812? wsn’t there a bigger attack when they like put a foriegn army onto our land, and put foreign warships in our waters, and invaded our land and burned washington dc?

if we didn’t resort to torture back then, why would we now? it’s only because of peole like you who are moral cowards and ignoramuses.

There isn’t one ticking time bomb that was revealed through our torture. And anyway, if you like torture, I don’t see you out there advocating we denounce the torture treaty that we signed which says in black and white that it bans torture even in emergency situations, that is, the ticking time bomb scenario. This treaty that reagan and bush promoted and that was passed with a 2/3 senate vote and that people like you ignore, ignorign the rule of law totally.

He lived in pakistan. we tortured all over and still didn’t find him. that tells you a fuck of a lot — it tells you torture doesn’t work dude. That’s why we banned it. Same thing in your local police station dude, let them torture to find kidnapping victims and murderes and pretty soon the whole police force is magically “solving” crimes right and left. Adults know it doesn’t work. Do you?

Butt there is more… the liberal news service AP wrote it was enhanced interrogation techniques delivered the information that Obama used to kill Osama.

Butt there is more… the liberal newspaper WA Post wrote it was enhanced interrogation techniques delivered the information that Obama used to kill Osama. BTW if you carefully search I gave the links to all of these on this blog.

You see yelling loser boy, I have to repeat the information because liberals have no mental capacity to remember anything!

We learned this week Osama was hiding in Pakistan since 2002 probably under the direct protection of Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the current Director-General of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.

The rest of your rant is worthless pixels on the screen. It seems facts and liberals just don’t mix well.

@38 “He’s been allowed to post over 30,000 comments here – second only to Roger Rabbit.”

Gee, do I hold some kind of record on HA? I haven’t been keeping score … I have no idea how many comments I’ve posted, how can you determine this? Anyway, this being Kentucky Derby Day, it seems quite appropriate for you to point out that I beat pudpuller by a length or two. You wouldn’t expect a rabbit to finish behind a slug, would you? By the way, the Derby winner was a horse named ANIMAL KINGDOM.

Meanwhile, another commemoration is in the news. Fifty years ago, on May 4, 1961, seven black people and six white people boarded a bus in Jackson, Mississippi. Within a short time, hundreds of people — black and white — were being arrested, beaten by angry white mobs, and jailed by redneck sheriffs. They were called the Freedom Riders and they helped set puddy’s people free.

I think it’s great that we live in a counry where a black guy is sitting in the Oval Office and another black guy is sitting at a computer typing idiocy without being dragged off to a mental sanatorium. One of these guys obviously is more mentally stable than the other one, but they’re both free men. What I don’t understand is why the mentally unstable one votes for a party that wants to repeal the 14th Amendment.

Question #1: How does killing Osama bin laden not provide closure to 9/11 victims? If someone did that to my loved one, I’d sleep better at night knowing the bastard is fish food, know what I mean?

Question #2: Who is being prosecuted? I’m not aware of any prosecutions. In fact, I don’t think anybody’s been fired, beyond the normal turnover in political appointments when a different party takes office.

@63 “We learned this week Osama was hiding in Pakistan since 2002 probably under the direct protection of Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the current Director-General of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.”

Yeah, well, gee, who wudda thunk ISI was protecting Osama? I guessed that years ago. Anyone who knows anything about Pakistan knows that ISI is run by Islamic fundie fanatics who sympathize with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Gee, do I hold some kind of record on HA? I haven’t been keeping score … I have no idea how many comments I’ve posted, how can you determine this?

I’ve scraped the comment threads. I’ve got nearly 477,000 comments in a database on my laptop (backed up of course). No I didn’t type them in or anything like that. I wrote some code to do that extraction process – it’s not that hard to do.

You have nearly 64,000 comments, probably a few more than that. I’ve haven’t nailed down all of your aliases before Roger Rabbit.

So you’re #1 – you’ve beat Puddybud by a country mile. He’s at something over 30,000.

@69Question #1: How does killing Osama bin laden not provide closure to 9/11 victims? If someone did that to my loved one, I’d sleep better at night knowing the bastard is fish food, know what I mean?

well, one way it doesn’t provide closure is that if president obamas friend and appointee van jones, is correct, then the moassad was responsible for 9/11, and they got away scott free. so, either we got the wrong guy, or, obama has friends who are crazy and the white house doesnt vet their hires. which one do you go for?

Now that Osama is dead, it’s really, really time to leave Afgahnistan. Why are we still involved in that mess?

Because Pakistan is NOT our friend. The fact that bin Ladin was living for more than five fucking years less than half a mile away from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point, indicates that he had good friends in high places in the Pakistani military. Pakistan, is an unstable country, the military operates completely independent of the civilian government and the civilian government has no control over their military at all. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and if things go to shit there, we might just have to go in and get those out.

Point two:

Dick Cheney has long been an advocate for Pakistan, lobbying Congress to provide them with “foreign aid” ($22 million average per year over the last 10 years) that the Pakistani government then uses to purchase weapons from American weapons manufacturers. That money is then used to pay for the campaigns of many members of Congress with the weapons manufacturers in their respective States. Those Congressmen then vote for more foreign aid to countries like Pakistan so that country can buy more weapons from the companies that own the congresspeople.

The great theater of the absurd runs this country when the fascists are in charge.

Dick Cheney has been a foreign agent for the Pakistanis for decades. He’s made a shitload of money from that, and has doled out several tens of millions of dollars to Congressmen over the decades to pay for their campaigns. Theres no way he didn’t know exactly where bin Ladin was. The GOP needed him kept alive to continue to terrorize American citizens into voting for them. It’s all about the cash flow.

@80Dick Cheney has long been an advocate for Pakistan, lobbying Congress to provide them with “foreign aid” ($22 million average per year over the last 10 years) that the Pakistani government then uses to purchase weapons from American weapons manufacturers.

oh please! dont make me puke my supper. 22 million a year? israel gets 5 BILLION a year. with a population of about 6 million. vomit

All republicans but the two libertarians, Paul and Johnson, want torture — excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — enshrined at the core of our interrogation policy. That was consistent with comments earlier in the week from Republicans looking for a share of the credit for something they were unable to do in office. Who conveniently forget that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and never gave up bin Laden’s courier friend.

I have yet to get more than sound bites and blog entries confirming that torture was the sole reason we got bin Laden. That we could have gotten the information from traditional sources. And regardless, America is better than that, We Don’t Torture, if we do, we are no better than savages.

I have yet to get more than sound bites and blog entries confirming that torture was the sole reason we got bin Laden.

It wasn’t. There’s been a bunch of terror types hanging out in the town where OBL was found, so the town was already on the map and when the CIA took a look at satellite images of the town and saw his compound they were all WTF???

I’m trying to think of a good analogy. This makes about as much sense:

Saying torture from 7 years ago was the reason we got Bin Ladin now, is like two college kids having sloppy drunken sex at a collage party then not seeing each other again, yet the boy is claiming he’s the dad when the woman got pregnant 7 years later and is suing for child support.

The conventional wisdom says Mitt Romney is the GOP frontrunner, and I agree with that, not only because he has the best name recognition but also because he’s built the only halfway moderate brand out there.

That, of course, is an illusion. Romney, a notorious flip-flopper who dissed health care reform after a Democratic black president despised by his party’s racists enacted — almost word-for-word — the health care reform that Romney peddled when he was a goernor, will pander to his party’s hard-rights and do anything else necessary to please the assortment of birthers, deficit hawks, militarists, neocons, and other social rejects now gathered under the GOP tent as if his party were some kind of halfway house. And that will blow away whatever credibility Mitt ever had with hardhat Democrats and independents.

The fact Romney is the best and most credible candidate the GOPers have spells big trouble for the Republican Party. The rest of the GOP field is a joke! Given their options, they probably should nominate him, but they won’t. He’s too, you know, rational. Someone will emerge from the pack of wannabes, not the most reasonable, but he who can raise the most money. That could be anything — a lizard for all we know.

Yep, the 2012 campaign season is upon us, and Republicans can’t even get their initial fundraising organized. This is gonna be fun, fun, fun!!!

This article, btw, contains a laundry list of potential challengers against Sen. Maria Cantwell, who’s going to be re-elected next year. Hey, I’m not saying she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread or Real Networks stock, all I’m saying is she’s going to be re-elected next year. This is a Blue state. Those Reds are just spinning their wheels.

2012 is shaping up to be one of the funnest campaigns ever for Democrats, because our Republican friends are planning to run on a platform of kicking poor elderly people out of nursing homes to give billionaires more tax cuts.

Fun, fun, fun! Remember how the GOPers won the House in 2010? By promising jobs. What jobs? They haven’t created any jobs, only more stock market millionaires. You don’t hear anything from them about jobs anymore. That’s because they don’t have any jobs to offer us. Nope, what they’re gonna run on is the deficit — you know, their deficit created when their party was in power by their borrow-and-spend policies. Fun, fun, fun! We’ll not only get the House back, we’ll probably get some bonus seats, too!

I’m sure glad I’m not a Republican candidate who has to run for Congress on a party-decreed platform of kicking old folks out of nursing homes while not cutting a penny from military spending that increased 80% under Bush.

“In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe — one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment — when … the brush poked through. … The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough. …

“Exelon’s risky decisions occurred under the noses of on-site inspectors from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No documented inspection of the pipes was made by anyone from the N.R.C. for at least the eight years preceding the leak, and the agency also failed to notice that Exelon kept lowering the acceptable standard, according to … the commission’s inspector general. Exelon’s penalty? A reprimand for two low-level violations — a tepid response all too common at the N.R.C. …

“Critics have long painted the commission as … weak and compliant, and incapable of keeping close tabs on an industry to which it remains closely tied. The concerns have greater urgency because of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, which many experts say they believe was caused as much by lax government oversight as by a natural disaster.”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: That’s why we shouldn’t build nuclear plants in America — they aren’t safe, and can’t be built in a safe manner or safely run, because the profit motive will trump safety every time and we have no effective restraint on profit motive run amok. And if you think a regulatory agency run by a federal government that’s owned lock, stock, and barrel by corporations and their lobbyists can effectively regulate an industry with a deep a history of irresponsibility and lying as the nuclear industry has, you must be on LSD. The nuclear industry can’t be trusted, and neither can the industry bootlickers who supposedly regulate them. That’s a compelling reason for not building more nuclear plants — but there are other compelling reasons, too, such as Congress’s reckless decision to make surrounding communities, not the industry, bear the financial costs of a major accident.

puddy dude — @ 62 — um, dude. are you dumb? I aske dyou to back it up and you repeat three claims that someone somewhere else said it and you don’t epxlain WHO WHAT WHERE or WHEN torture worked to get us OBL.

So I ask you again. what piece of info did we get from torture that led to osama bin laden?

and there’s more.

if torture worked….how come we didn’t find bin laden for….oh gee it took TEN YEARS.

wow. very effective method, that torturing people. so this time buddypuddy, answer the damn question. you tell me, what piece of info was gotten vai torture from what detainee/torture victim that led to us getting bin laden, that we could not have gotten otherwise?

and more: why the fuck did it take ten fucking years?

and this. you like torture, right? why aren’t you screaming we should have tortured bin laden?

what about his wife. she’s been harboring a cirminal, she’s guilty, let’s torture her, too. maybe the pakistanis are doing that. i bet that makes you real happy.

here’s another thought. the pakistanis obviously have ben sheltering bin laden. HEY WHY NOT KIDNAP THE HEAD OF PAKISTANI ISI AND TORTURE HIM TOO!!!!!

wow this torture rocks, let’s use it all over, that will be great for our security.

right?

and this time don’t run away like a little chicken. answer the damn question. what piece of info did we get from torture that led to bin laden, and if torture is so fucking great, why’d it take us ten fucking years? ifhe’s there in abbotabad whatever, and we’re torturing all over the place, it didn’t work, DID IT.

here’s another thought for you right wingers. Bush lied to us some more. when he said bin laden is clearly out of it, not really leading the group anymore….sort of downplaying his own failure to get him…that was a big old freaking lie. just like the wmd lies, the torture lies, and the lies that you spew every day including the lie that you have backedit up when you couldn’t even mention onesingle piece of info we got thru torutre that led to getting obl.

@110 And you’re lapping it up, right? Right! Republicans love violence, period. Remember how Saint Raygun fed guns to Central American death squads who murdered journalists and nuns in cold blood? Remember how they criticized Clinton for putting an end to Milosevicz’s Serbian genocide? Republicans never met killers they didn’t embrace. Maybe that explains why Osama bin Laden had a free ride while they were in office.

Rep. Allen West is a dangerous man. We’ve shown the proud tea bagger’s proclivities toward violence, surrounding himself with other loonies and criminals and absolute intolerance of dissent at his town halls. He is the epitome of the tea party.

And like most of the tea party, Allen West has no interest in understanding the issues on any kind of true educated level. Being dumb and violently inclined has worked so well for him so far. That’s why he can come up with gems like this:

Warning the crowd about the economic and national security dangers that China poses to the United States, West declared – twice – that “China is in control of the Panama Canal”:

This about equals the puddybitch’s level of nuance and undertanding of issues. puudybitch loooooves him the party’s fave-rave tea-grow.

109, 114, 116 We do need to honor our trolls with a Golden Goat, don’t we? It’s been awhile. They’ve been working hard, fervently spewing nauseating nonsense in the hope of recognition, any sort of recognition, yet nothing comes their way, lately. Pud’s a two-time winner; he’s in the Goat Hall of Fame. But, he’s still out there scrambling, refusing to retire, long after his skills have left him. We do have some other competitors, though, don’t we?

hey puddy buddy. still waiting. we got bin laden, this is your golden opportunity to prove that torture works still waiting for you to tell us

what was the piece of info obtained form torture of whom when where that led to us getting bin laden? that we couldn’t have obtained without torture.

and please explain if tortureis so fucking wonderful

1. why did it take ten fucking years to get bin laden? tick, tock, tick, tock, time is urgent, must torture, that’s whatyou said, all over and over again, it works for emergencies but this took ten fucking years so that means torture DID NOT WORK TO GET US BIN LADEN right?

because it’s been ten years. No answer, right? all i can say is: coward.

2. if torture is so great, why aren’t you out there recommending we torutre bin laden his wives? big mistake right, we shoulda taken him in and tortured the hell out of him. i mean not just waterboarding but the whole shebang. he’s the mastermind, he knows every imminent plot, right? he knows all the contacts, the personnel, the accounts! so you should be advocating for first pulling out hisnails, then gouging out his eyeballs, then cutting the you know what, then disembowling him, right? because you say torture is justified. so why are you so weal you back off now?

see, if you really believed in it, that’swhere it would take you. but you don’t. you just claim to believe in it, and it all boils down to the one little word:

coward.

you don’t have the answers, you don’t have the courage of your own fake convictions, and the baby talk is the only part of you that’s not fake.

we did KSM 183 times. But bin laden not even once? admit it, you’re scared of torture because you know it’s evil, wrong, produces more attacks and recrtuis for them, and you know at the bottom of your heart that it does not work.

your espousal of it ismere pandering, to yourself, and others, and is cowardly.

you’re scared of torture because you know it’s evil, wrong, produces more attacks and recrtuis for them, and you know at the bottom of your heart that it does not work.

This is wrong. Puddybud embraces torture and doesn’t even think it’s torture. Torture is something that those to the left of Bush and Cheney do. He calls it enhanced interrogation in the manner of the unhinged idiot tool Sean Hannity. Puddybud adores the Bush/Cheney torture policies.

The trolls on this thread are taking teh stupid to a level I’ve never seen them do before. What’s up with that? I’m not sure what’s getting to them more – Obama taking out Bin Laden or Obama taking out Trump.

South Carolina conservatives held their circle-jerk this weekend and issued the usual rightwing dire warnings about SOCIALISM:

“At this weekend’s South Carolina GOP convention, Republican lawmakers warned that a second term for President Obama would kill America’s independent spirit and guarantee a permanent big government welfare state. …

“Sen. Jim DeMint, the Palmetto State’s conservative firebrand, has for months said the upcoming presidential election ‘is our last chance to get it right.’

“‘There’s no question that we are moving, step by step, closer to socialism. So that puts democracy at risk to some extent,’ Rep. Tim Scott, a Republican who represents South Carolina’s 1st district, said in an interview. ‘How much, how soon, I’m not sure. But if you’re financially bankrupt, I think everything’s at risk.'”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: Uh, yeah, I understand why a lot of Republicans feel bankrupt these days … because they are. Now that their financial house of cards has collapsed on them.

Federal taxes, as a percentage of GDP, are at an all-time low. The major federal welfare program has virtually ceased to exist and the rest of the social safety net is being shredded. And these guys think we’re on the verge of a socialist takeover?

And while we’re worrying about bankruptcy, let’s not forget this is the crowd that turned budget surpluses into gargantuan deficits — by, among other things, nearly doubling military spending in the span of one administration. (Theirs.)

The age of Jackson. It’s funny that a lot of right wing idiots celebrate Harding and Coolidge but they forget Jackson who balanced the government books and ELIMINATED the U.S. Debt – he was that fanatical about it.

The government was debt free for ONE year and a massive financial panic and depression ensued.

Awwwwwwww. The poor Koch-addled, Obama-hating, knee jerk ld/LD(iot)s of the world must be crying right now:

“We’re seeing quite an uptick in our exports from the U.S. because of the low dollar,” said Eric Spiegel, president and chief executive officer of Siemens Corp., a subsidiary in Washington of Munich-based Siemens AG. (SIE) Siemens exports $2 billion to $3 billion a year from the U.S.

Shrinking Trade Gap

The Obama administration is counting on manufacturers to help double shipments to foreign markets by 2015 and reduce the trade deficit. Rising exports have helped shrink the trade gap 24 percent to $45.8 billion as of February, the most recent month available, from $59.9 billion in January 2008, a month after the recession began.

The Wisconsin Republicans are trying to cram three years worth of legislation into the next two months, apparantly being quite afraid of the potential results of the recall efforts.

Included in that legislation being “fast tracked” through are new laws legalizing the carrying of concealed handguns, privatising telephone service throughout the state, and another attept at destroying the public worker unions (apparantly they are concerned that their initial gambit isn’t going to hold up too well in ocurt).

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